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A note of reflection after 10 years of “A successful Git branching model”
In this post I present a Git branching strategy for developing and releasing version-based software.
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 475 posts.
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Mistakes That Kill Startups (2006)
October 2006 In the Q & A period after a recent talk, someone asked what made startups fail. After standing there gaping for a few seconds I realized this was kind of a trick question. It's equivalent to asking how to make a startup succeed — if you avoid every cause of failure, you succeed — and that's too big a…
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Lisping at JPL (2002)
This is the story of the rise and fall of Lisp at the Jet Propulsion Lab as told from my personal (and highly biased) point of view. I am not writing in my official capacity as an employee of JPL, nor am I in any way representing the official position of JPL. (This will become rather obvious shortly.)
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Command-line tools can be faster than a Hadoop cluster (2014)
Adam Drake is an advisor to scale-up tech companies. He writes about ML/AI/data, leadership, and building tech teams.
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The Toxoplasma of Rage (2014)
I. Some old news I only just heard about: PETA is offering to pay the water bills for needy Detroit families if (and only if) those families agree to stop eating meat. Predictably, the move caused …
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How Developers Stop Learning: Rise of the Expert Beginner (2012)
In this post, I describe the phenomenon of the so-called expert beginner -- someone with mediocre skill who thinks he's an expert.
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Knuth versus Email (1999)
I have been a happy man ever since January 1, 1990, when I no longer had an email address. I'd used email since about 1975, and it seems to me that 15 years of email is plenty for one lifetime.
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Reverse Engineering the Source Code of the BioNTech/Pfizer SARS-CoV-2 Vaccine
Translations: ελληνικά / عربى / 中文 (Weixin video, Youtube video) / 粵文 / bahasa Indonesia / český / Català / český / Deutsch / Español / 2فارسی / فارسی / Français / עִברִית / Hrvatski / Italiano / Magyar / Nederlands / 日本語 / 日本語 2 / नेपाली / Polskie / русский / Português / Română / Slovensky / Slovenščina / Srpski /…
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Collections: The Fremen Mirage, Part I: War at the Dawn of Civilization
Bret Devereaux (A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry)2020cited by 42History & Retro Computing details
This week’s post is the first in a four part series (II, IIIa, IIIb, interlude, IV) looking at what I’m going to term the Fremen Mirage (a play on Le Mirage Spartiate, which we’ve…
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GPT-3 Creative Fiction
Creative writing by OpenAI’s GPT-3 model, demonstrating poetry, dialogue, puns, literary parodies, and storytelling. Plus advice on effective GPT-3 prompt programming & avoiding common errors.
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Blogging about Midori (2015)
Joe Duffy's Blog | Adventures in the high-tech underbelly
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Why Don’t We Use Chemical Weapons Anymore?
Bret Devereaux (A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry)2020203 points237 commentscited by 39History & Retro Computing details
This week, we’re going to talk briefly about why ‘we’ – and by ‘we’ here, I mean the top-tier of modern militaries – have generally eschewed the systematic…
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Firefox usage is down despite Mozilla's top exec pay going up
Mozilla is in an absolute state: high overheads, falling usage of Firefox, questionable sources of revenue and now making big cuts to engineering as their income falls.
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Zig cc: A drop-in replacement for GCC/Clang
If you have heard of Zig before, you may know it as a promising new programming language which is ambitiously trying to overthrow C as the de-facto systems language. But did you know that it also can straight up compile C code?
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The Tao of Programming (1987)
Note: I copied this from http://misspiggy.gsfc.nasa.gov/tao.html and stripped out all of the IMHO extraneous formatting. ---Alex
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Oklab: A perceptual color space for image processing
From personal project to industry standard Introduction added in 2025 When introduced Oklab in 2020, I never expected it to reach as far as...
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The Wetware Crisis: the Dead Sea effect (2008)
[ Updated (06/16/08): Here’s a real-world project review memo , written several years ago, that described (among many other things) the Dead Sea effect. ]
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Wikipedia Is Badly Biased
Wikipedia's "NPOV" is dead. The original policy long since forgotten, Wikipedia no longer has an effective neutrality policy. There is a rewritten policy, but it endorses the utterly bankrupt canard that journalists should avoid what they call "false balance."
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"Within C++, there is a much smaller and cleaner language struggling to get out"
These are questions that people ask me often. If you have better questions or comments on the answers, feel free to email me. Please remember that I can't spend all of my time improving my homepages.
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The fraying of the U.S. global currency reserve system
Published December 2, 2020 Since autumn of 2019, I’ve been bearish on the dollar, meaning I have a longish-term outlook towards a weaker dollar. This view began forming when the Federal Reserve cut interest rates in summer 2019, and then the view solidified with a catalyst after an overnight repo rate spike in…
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Your Computer Isn't Yours
There have been several updates appended to this page as of 2020-11-16, please see below. Also available in: Türkçe Français Español Português Português…
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Bread, How Did They Make It?
Bret Devereaux (A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry)2020120 points32 commentscited by 30History & Retro Computing details
Thanks to our helpful volunteer narrator, this entire post series is now also available in audio format! This essay will hopefully be the first post in a series (II, III, IV, A) covering some of th…
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CQRS: Command Query Responsibility Segregation (2011)
CQRS (Command Query Responsibility Segregation) is the notion that you can use a different model to update information than the model you use to read information
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Firefox and Chromium
Firefox is sometimes recommended as a supposedly more secure browser because of its parent company's privacy practices. This article explains why this notion is not true and enumerates a number of security weaknesses in Firefox's security model when compared to Chromium. In particular, it covers the less granular…
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Design Principles Behind Smalltalk (1981)
The purpose of the Smalltalk project is to provide computer support for the creative spirit in everyone. Our work flows from a vision that includes a creative individual and the best computing hardware available. We have chosen to concentrate on two principle areas of research: a language of description (programming…